1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and system for providing information to vehicles from a remote location and for providing vehicle related information from a vehicle to the remote location.
2. Description of Related Art
The upkeep and maintenance of vehicles is essential to maintain a vehicle in good running condition and to maintain the overall reputation of a vehicle manufacturer. For example, even if a vehicle malfunctions or breaks down because of user neglect, as opposed to a vehicle defect, the reputation of the vehicle manufacturer will still be injured, especially if several vehicles malfunction because of user neglect. Thus, as users often neglect to regularly service their vehicles, upgrade their vehicles with improved replacement parts, and in some cases, even forget to replace recalled vehicle parts—it is important to remind users to service their vehicles.
Known methods to remind users are very inflexible, cumbersome and inefficient. In previous methods, vehicles were manufactured with warning lights that are activated when an event occurs. For example, maintenance reminder lights and low oil level lights are activated to remind users to bring their car to a service provider. The lights are activated only according to the time intervals and levels that were originally preprogrammed into a memory of the vehicle. Thus, if a service provider that a user often went to service his vehicle determined that a new service schedule should be used that differed from the original preprogrammed schedule, he could not update the memory to incorporate the new schedule or it would be very difficult to do so. Likewise, if a user wanted to deactivate such reminders, the user could not do so without following an intricate set of steps, which usually required the assistance of a professional service provider to carry out.
Moreover, subsequent developments, such as car part recall notices or the development of an improved part to be used in the vehicle, could not be sent to the vehicle by using such previous methods. To inform users of such developments, vehicle manufacturers and other service providers were forced to resort to mailing product brochures and the like to users. The process of mailing brochures is not only expensive, but timely, cumbersome and inefficient.
Even if a user wished to bring in his car for service in response to a warning light or receiving an updated brochure, the user would be required to locate the phone number of the service provider, contact the service provider and schedule an appointment. The user would be forced to schedule the appointment after he exited the vehicle because much of the information a user would need to make the appointment is typically not carried with the user. After exiting the vehicle, the user may forget to schedule the appointment, despite the maintenance notification lights.
Other known methods provide retail and sales information to a vehicle based on a profile of the user, but such methods do not provide vehicle-related information to a user. As a result, the other methods do not address the need to provide a convenient and flexible way to inform the user of service schedules, product recalls and other notices pertinent to the vehicle.
In addition, in known methods, users oftentimes observe the preprogrammed notices but do not comprehend the significance of the notices. In other words, users oftentimes do not understand whether they should bring the vehicle for service in response to the notice or when they should bring their vehicle in. Previous methods provided a two-way calling mechanism for the user to place a call to a live operator when the notice appears. The live operator can then explain the significance of the notice to the user. Other methods automatically send a message to the live operator when an air bag of the vehicle deploys.
Such known methods, however, are very limited and inflexible. For example, users do not have the option to determine whether information regarding the occurrence of an event should be transmitted automatically, not transmitted or transmitted on a case-by-case basis to a remote location. In the prior art methods, users do not have the option to automatically send information about the occurrence of most events to the remote location. Rather, the users must manually use the two-way calling mechanism to inform an operator that a notification light has been activated. As a result, the previous methods leave the user with limited and inflexible ways to transmit information pertaining to vehicle problems to a remote location.
Other known methods have attempted to send general information to particular vehicles, but have used very inefficient and inflexible ways to do so. For example, the known methods use one-to-one communication systems to individually send data streams to particular vehicles in an attempt to send vehicle specific data to a particular vehicle. The problem with these methods, however, is that many vehicles require the same information. For example, several vehicles might require world or national news information. The previous methods, therefore, require the transmittal of the same information several times to a plurality of vehicles, which results in a wastage of precious bandwidth.
Other methods involve the transmittal of the same information to all vehicles. The problem with these methods, however, is that many vehicles are inundated with a large amount of unwanted information and the users are required to sift through the unwanted information.
As a result, there remains a need for methods that allow for the transmittal of vehicle-related information from a remote location to a vehicle and that allow for the selective transmittal of vehicle related information from a vehicle to a remote location. There also remains a need for an efficient method for sending vehicle specific information to vehicles.